Vox Meditantis

Friday, 27th November 1863

Ah, how the morning drifts over fields wedded to frost, and the hush at this old crossroads feels sacred – strange, as if the hush itself remembers yesterday, drawn like a veil across the worn earth. Did you walk in those hours, friend? Tell me, did your heart echo the president’s word, and did your soul tremble as mine? The bones of the road beneath my feet are worn thin, the stones settled deeper each season; yet in this place, where four directions meet and part, I sense more than the decay of timbers and rutted soil. Is that not the grand design, that all things pass – corn sheaves split, fences fall – so that something finer or purer may bloom in hearts? The world seems remade by gratitude, as if we are bid to find the good that remains even as the days erode beneath the weight of war and sorrow.

Some would say we are sisters to the dust, our hopes and struggles scattered by wind and rain – yet I look at this earth, where traces of old lives linger, and I know the truth is softer, more careful. Reality’s shape is not harsh ruin, but a gentle yielding – a stony path crumbling into soil where roots take hold anew. Light alters; worries gather in the rooms of our minds, but what is decay but a passage to something more tempered and sweet? The hymn we sang yesterday at meeting still presses on my memory, its words curling around me like a shawl against November’s chill.

Were your table dressed with holiday finery? Ours was plain – no matter, for mother herself has a way with the pumpkin, sweetened with molasses, set beside the bread white as new snow. Father would not hear of going hungry, so we made a turkey stew, thick and hearty, with onions from our neighbour’s patch. The songs we shared were homely, but bright as fire – no city fare, just the warmth of hands and the patient taste of pie cooled upon the sill. A special dish? I think our true feast is nothing we prepare with kettles and oven, but the gathering itself – the good company, laughter, and prayer stitched into the meal by hands old and young alike – so it is in this hard year, when absence sits beside us at table just as surely as kin.

Therefore, I stand at this meeting of ways, my face lifted to a pallid sky; the world is frayed around the edges, yes, but stitched through with mercy. The old turnings erode, and so do we – but is that not the chief wonder? To find joy set into the seams of hardship, to witness how love lingers where loss would seem lord? On this day after Thanksgiving, in this hour so full of breath and breaking, I am content to believe that reality itself, for all its falling away, holds up the lantern of hope when the night presses its shadow closest.

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.